Degrees of Freedom
by TheMoonAlwaysFalls
Summary: Degrees of freedom, n. - In statistics, the number of values in the final calculation of a statistic that are free to vary. In other words, Dean is a math teacher. Castiel, well, isn't. - Destiel, teacher-AU


_You have freedom when you're easy in your harness._ ~ Robert Frost

* * *

There were only two things that could possibly make Dean's day worse: death and taxes. Thankfully, he was pretty sure (well, at least hopeful) that death wouldn't come knocking on his doorstep today, and it wasn't April 15th yet or the end of the month, so the latter was out of the question. Oh, he knew he should be jumping for joy (in a non-literal fashion) that he was getting a paycheck and that it was a beautiful day.

But he wasn't happy, and it was hot as fuck and most definitely totally not a beautiful day.

Today marked the first day back at LawrenceHigh School, and the school board could not have picked a worse day of the year to return on. It was one-hundred-degrees-plus-change, and humidly sticky outside. Normally, this was something that Dean could handle; he liked the hot weather. Hot weather meant pretty girls wore bikinis outside while they washed their cars. Hot weather meant bowls of melting ice cream and snow cones dripping with syrup and dropping ice cubes down Sam's swim trunks for shits and giggles. Hot weather meant jumping into chlorine pools and gasping for air when then freezing water ran straight up his trunks and trickled past his balls.

Unfortunately, the week before the students returned, the sewage line down the math hall of Lawrence High School became home to a family of rambunctious raccoons. No one could figure out how they got there, but somehow they did. As a result, the math hall then became home to a broken sewage line.

Dean was a math teacher, and his room was right next to the bathroom.

It doesn't take a math teacher to figure out hot weather plus a broken sewage line equals misery. Hot, stinky, suffering, sulfuric misery, which is almost marginally worse than death or taxes.

So Dean sits at his desk, shuffling papers to be handed out to his homeroom class. The air around him smells of pain and suffering and the complaints of his new freshman homeroom class are deafening. This was only his second year of teaching - the school hadn't given him a homeroom class last year. But these freshmen, these complaining, whining, confused freshmen would be his homeroom class for four years until they all dropped out or graduated.

It was going to be a long four years.

Of course, the girl in the front (Brenda, Bella, Beta Fish, whatever her name is; Dean neglected to look at the list) is the first to point out exactly how bad it smells. She's not an unattractive girl, but she's fourteen, and fourteen-year-old girls can come up with the most unattractive faces. Her nose is scrunched up and her lips are pursed and she's doing this _thing_ with her eyebrows that make them join together into a unibrow. She looks kind of like Sam does when he disapproves of something.

She looks straight at Dean. "Did something die in here or did the janitors forget to take out the garbage this summer?"

Dean ignores her. He learned last year that stupid questions, or in this case, questions asked out of sheer facetiousness were best ignored. Sam has to constantly remind him of this.

Dean begins handing out the paperwork that all the freshmen have to bring back, and then he passes back schedules. He finally has to consult his roll - something that he had been dreading due to the fact that he is awful with names - and finally starts giving the right schedule to the right student. The students glare at him, some with plain annoyance and some with stars in their eyes. This was typically gender-respective.

He didn't have a homeroom last year, so a speech was unnecessary. He has prepared a speech this year. A welcoming, kind of - if you want to call it that.

So Dean begins, "I know right now high school seems a little scary-

"Not really," Beta Fish or Brenda or Bella says, rolling her eyes.

"You wanna give the speech? No? Then shut your trap."

She gives him a nasty look.

So Dean continues, "Like, I was saying, high school may be a little scary. You're not in eighth grade anymore. You're the bottom of the food chain, and you will be for the next three years. But I'm your advisor, and I'm here to help. Now, I'm no English teacher, but the definition of an advisor is someone older and wiser than you, and I think I fit the bill pretty nicely. I can tell you how well you're doing and help you out when you need it. I know most students aren't math oriented, so I'm always willing to help during my planning period."

Dean stops for a moment to look at the class of thirty-two freshmen. He knows that half of them will be gone by next year. Some will move away to other schools or cities or states, some are already old enough to drop out and probably will, and some just have too much other stuff going on to come to school. By senior year, there will maybe be a fourth of his homeroom still left, and even a couple of them will be so far off track that they won't graduate. As much as Dean tries to see the best in his students, he knows he can probably pick out the ones who will graduate and the ones who won't.

"Some of you might be in my accelerated Math 1 class third period, so you'll get used to me a lot quicker than some students," Dean continues, though he knows that the only ones who are listening are the two boys who will be in his third period. "But its whatever - you only spend fifteen minutes a day in here. Make the most of it. You might never have me as a teacher. Anyway, don't be late to class, don't get written up too much, don't be stupid, yada yada yada. Have a great year."

And so Dean sits down behind his desk and lets his homeroom talk. They're awfully loud, but he doesn't stop them. Last year, he learned that one of his favorite things to do during the school day was to eavesdrop. Really, he's more knowledgeable than most of the student body.

When Dean was in high school, he didn't think the teachers really knew anything about the student body. They were just teachers, right? They came to school, did their jobs, and went home to their own lives. He was wrong – teachers knew everything about the student body. They knew who was talking to whom, and who was dating supposed to be having the great party on the weekend, and which students were fucking each other, and which students got arrested on what offense. And then they gossiped about it with other teachers who paid attention. Sometimes they even had interventions with some of the students.

Right now, the gossip is nothing more than blah blah blah, what'd-you-do-last-summer kind of stuff. Nothing too juicy, but they were freshmen and wouldn't know too much of anything right now. They were barely out of diapers. He would wait until his senior classes to get the good info; he has a Physics class for seniors and gifted juniors together and a senior AP Statistics class. Those classes are where he learns most of the juicy stuff.

The bell to signal the end of homeroom screams, and every teenager in the room jumps up as if the intercom announced free chicken fingers in the rotunda (if you've never seen a hungry teenager on Chicken Finger Wednesdays, you don't know what true desperation is). Dean sighs with relief. He realizes that he doesn't like his homeroom very much right now.

* * *

Dean makes it to lunch with his sanity still intact. His first period is much better than his homeroom because his first period is filled with sophomores that he taught the year before. They're all pretty cool; they know him and all of his quirks as a teacher and don't do stupid things. Well, they do stupid things, but with less frequency. Dean can handle that.

Dean's second period class is ridiculously chill. It's a class of regular Math 4 seniors. He knows he'll have trouble getting them to work later in the year, and it will be hard to get them started, but they'll work once he puts some momentum behind them.

His third period – well, he's seen worse. They were slightly better than his first period was at the beginning of last year, but they were still freshmen, and they were still stupid. It was okay. He would have them trained within a week.

Dean has lunch before his fourth period starts, and that is perfectly okay with him. This year, he lucked out with the lunch time – he's on A-lunch, which means he eats at eleven o'clock. He gets up at four a.m. and an early lunch is exactly what he likes. An early lunch also means that his fourth period will usually be sleepy rather than rowdy, and he prefers this. Instead of yelling to be heard, he'll be yelling to keep everyone awake.

Fourth period is his Physics class, which happens to be his own personal favorite subject. Dean likes physics because its hands on, and Dean is good with his hands. Sometimes he even gets to show off the Impala by jacking up the hood and showing how physics and the engine work together. Usually the interested ones are the boys in the class, but even some of the girls ooh and ahh at the Impala. He tries to do experiments at least twice a week since fourth period is block period, which is two hours long (lunch is included in the time period, and it's thirty minutes), and it is really hard to hold a class's attention for even half of that time span. Even so, he's usually able to keep everyone awake, even during the math sections.

Luckily, Dean doesn't have lunch duty this week, so he sits at his desk and eats the hamburger he has left over from the night before. Some teachers went and ate with teacher-friends and gossiped about students and work and other teachers during lunch; Dean locks his door and hopes no one knocks. (He uses his planning period for gossiping.)

Of course, today a knock at the door comes less than five minutes after he locks it.

The principal of LawrenceHigh School is a handsome, well-shaped older woman in her late fifties; she has learned the art of few words with a lot of meaning. Being that she is a woman of few words, she only says a single sentence to Dean before she walks out of his room. It's not a big deal – Dean is more than used to her curt, professional behavior by now.

She simply says, "Teacher evaluations begin in two weeks."

And that's it. That's all she has to say before she nods curtly and backs out of the doorway. Dean knows what this means: it's a subtle hint – more of a threat, really – to step up his game in the next two weeks to prepare. Teacher evaluations are serious. They aren't surprise visits, here-let-me-show-up-in-your-room-today type things. A few teachers (usually younger teachers) are selected to be watched for a period of two weeks by a fed sent from the accreditation service agency. It is most definitely some serious stuff.

Dean could handle it.

Dean is a good teacher, and he knows it. He works at it. He doesn't base his performance as a teacher solely on test scores; any student can memorize a formula and plug in numbers. Dean bases his performance as a teacher on how well students can answer and apply the knowledge to the question, and he always, always, always encourages his students to ask him for help. And hell, if they don't ask for help, he'll breathe down their necks until they do. He knows when a student is having trouble. He's lenient with his grading, especially with his seniors, but he often finds that all of his students (the students who care) do well anyway.

Dean is a good teacher because he was a bad student. He teaches the way he always wanted his teachers to teach him – he cares about his students, even the stupidly stubborn ones like him. Especially the stupidly stubborn ones like him. He wants all of them to do well, simply because if they do well in his class, they'll do well in any class. He's lenient, yeah, but he's tough – slackers don't survive for long in his class.

Dean is a good teacher because he cares. Some teachers – not many, but some - come to class for the paycheck and the two month vacation. Dean is there because he wants to be. His students exemplify the product of his caring – consistently high scores on all standardized testing. And, you know, a lot of good things to say about him.

An accreditation agent is really no big deal.

But Dean knows when he is being threatened, and so he vows to step it up these next two weeks. That accreditation agent won't know what hit him.

* * *

Dean's sixth period is his senior AP Statistics class. Everyone in the class is ridiculously smart, and so Dean knows that helping them will be a lot easier. The only problem is, they're so lazy and so chill that he wonders if he should slap a heart monitor on them. But he's excited to teach them anyway.

Laziness doesn't last long in Dean Winchester's class.

"Mr. Winchester, can we open a window or something?"

The boy in the front row looks like he should be smoking dope outside at his car. He's got a mullet, and his voice is thick and smoky. There's something in his eyes, though, that most dopers don't have – a spark. There is a lot more to this kid that meets the eye. AP Statistics is no joke, so this kid is there for a reason.

"Sorry, uh –," Dean quickly looks down at his roll, "Sorry, Ash. The Powers That Be dictate that it's against the building codes."

"It's cool, just thought I would ask," Ash says, and leans back in his desk with his hands folded neatly across his chest. He's on the verge of sleeping. Dean gives him a look, but doesn't press the issue. The kid looks like he really needs some sleep (and a haircut and maybe a big sandwich).

The blonde in the desk next to Ash eyes Dean – she's not quite starry-eyed yet, but she's most definitely appreciating his looks. As far as Dean can tell, she's that awesome helpful type he values in his potential pets. In the wake of Ash's slow drift into Neverland, she pipes up, "Don't worry, he gets like that sometimes."

Her name is Jo Harvelle, and she's looking at Dean with this small glimmer of hope in her eyes. She will continue to do that until Dean passes out his first test. Then the glimmers will become pinpoints of suffering, despair, and maybe a little bit of nausea.

"Okay, well, welcome to AP Statistics," Dean begins. He's prepared another speech, his sixth one today. "It's not gonna be an easy year. AP classes are meant to prove that you don't need the college class, so go ahead and get ready. If you're worried about your status as an honor graduate, you might wanna get out of this class now."

Dean points towards the door, but no one budges even an inch. He smiles.

"Your funeral."

He takes the stack of papers off his desk and starts passing them back. "I know you've got a lot of other stuff to get signed, but look over this syllabus and bring it back by the end of the week. It's a free grade. Believe me, you're gonna need it."

Ash snorts in his sleep, loud and long and wet. Jo looks as if she wants nothing more than to clap her hand over his mouth to get him to stop, and sighs long and low while the rest of the class snickers.

Jo feels the need to apologize, "He doesn't really get a lot of sleep at night."

"Hey, it's just the first day back. No problem," Dean says, shrugging. He touches the edge of his lip. "He's got a little, ugh…"

Ash is drooling while he snores, and Jo just looks frustrated. She punches his arm, but he still doesn't wake up.

"Just make sure he gets some sleep tonight."

Jo nods quickly, "I can do that."

Dean thinks that he may have found his pet for this class. He treats everyone in his classes as equally as he can, but sometimes he likes to play favorites. Okay, he likes to play favorites a lot. Playing favorites means that he doesn't have to go get his own mail from the mailroom.

Originally, he'd planned to hand out textbooks on the first day, but now that seemed a tad cruel after the day it looks like these seniors have had. Not to mention the room still stinks to high heaven and it even smells worse than it did that morning.

Dean's room smells like sweat, despair, and a broken sewage line. It smells like pain and suffering. It smells like he needs to open a window. Every student has a nasty, wrinkled up face, but Dean can no longer smell the badness. His stomach is strong and he doesn't have much smell capacity anyway – he made it through lunch without even a slight gag.

However, if there is one thing Dean Winchester cannot stand, it is the smell of mildewing old textbooks. He loathes it with the fire of a thousand suns. Mildewing old textbooks smell like sour milk, which is one of the few things that truly make his stomach turn. Now, if he got those textbooks from the breakroom to hand out right this second, those old textbooks would smell like sour _poop_ milk, and he won't stand for it.

Dean sighs, "I'll hand out textbooks later this week or something. Now, if you'll look at the syllabus I handed you, I'll kind of skim over the rules and procedures and stuff."

Papers rustle and the rings of notebooks pop as the students secure them. Dean shuffles his own paper where it had been folded over the staple.

"Number one: do right."

Dean is a high school math teacher, not a saint. He likes the finer things in life: women, whiskey, and a nice, cold beer. He loves a late-night party as long as it involves all three and a lot of classic rock. He knows that a lot of the kids he teaches like the same things. The best he can do is to remind them to do right, as in "do the best you can for other people and yourself with that you have."

"Number two: always ask for help if you don't understand."

Dean's eyes sweep across the room. He knows that look – skepticism. He's seen that look before, he'll see it again, but he'll address it now.

"I get here at seven-thirty every morning, I have A-lunch and fifth period planning, and I'm always here until five after school. Ask me then if you want private time, ask me during class – it doesn't matter to me. Just ask for help. A lot of you think it's a weakness to ask for help – you don't have to tell me, I know. My brother is a genius and he was like that, too – still is. But suck it up and ask."

Some of them won't ask. He'll have to breathe down their necks until they do.

"Number three: don't stress."

This is his favorite rule, and one he tries to reiterate as much as possible. Math is just numbers. It's just a concept. If you can remember the rules, every problem is your bitch. He has to tell his senior classes this rule on a daily basis – don't stress. Just be a sponge and soak up the knowledge and do a few problems and take a few notes.

"That's the most important rule to remember. Don't stress," Dean shrugs his shoulders and tosses the paper over his shoulder. "Yeah, this stuff is hard, but you can do it, every last one of you."

He pauses for a moment to let the class take in his words. It's the end of the first day of school – the lull is almost tangible now. Most of the faces are blank, most of the eyes empty and staring. These seniors are already ready to graduate.

"We start notes tomorrow."

One hundred and seventy nine days left.

* * *

There are three cars that cohabitate the Winchester household: the Impala, a '81 GMC Sierra, and a '07 Nissan Sentra. Dean doesn't drive the Impala to work usually (except when he wants to show off). It uses a lot of gas, and he has to drive twelve miles through heavy traffic to get to work. The Sierra is a bit worse for wear. It's old and black and the paint is peeling a little underneath the windows and sometimes the alternator whines terribly, but it's functional. The Sentra is actually pretty nice, even if it lacks a lot of the giddyup that Dean values in a car. Technically, the Sierra is Dean's, but it gets worse mileage than the Impala, so he drives Sam's Sentra to work. Sam works five miles away, so in turn, he drives the Sierra.

Sam is at the end of a pre-law program and he'll be moving to Stanford in the fall of next year (Dean is almost dizzy with pride and maybe a twinge of sadness). To gain experience, Sam works at a law firm five miles away, and he goes there after class every day. The firm closes at four, Sam is home by four-thirty, and Dean is always home by five.

When Dean arrives home, the Sierra is sitting in the driveway like usual.

The unusual part is that a sleek cream-colored Lexus is sitting next to the Sierra.

Dean isn't exactly sure what to think. He doesn't know anyone who drives a car that nice, and he's at least ninety-eight percent sure that Sam doesn't either. He highly doubts that his dad is home, or that he's made enough to afford a _Lexus_. His dad can't even afford the gas for his truck.

He parks in the street because the Lexus is in his spot and heads inside the house.

The house itself isn't too flashy; it's pale blue and has a shingled roof with white trim and a white porch. There are large bushes out in front that are a pain to trim in the summer, and there are hanging pots on the porch. A wooden picket fence surrounds the rest of the property, and the backyard consists of a pool, a tiny little shed filled to the dusty brim, and a rosebush that only really gets any attention because Sam is weird and prunes it religiously.

Dean loves that house. He loves that it's still his, considering all the hardships. He loves it because John fought to keep it for him and Sam – working two or sometimes three jobs after Mary's death. John wasn't home often anymore, hardly ever really, but he was still fighting for Dean and Sam.

Dean sees three things in the hallway of his beloved home.

The first thing Dean sees when he steps into the house is not Sam – it is Sam's suit jacket. Sam Winchester, Dean was fairly sure, would rather pull his fingernails out one by one than iron a suit jacket, so he never leaves it on the coat rack. He always puts it on a hanger in the hallway closet because he really, _really_ hates ironing (almost as much as he hates folding clothes).

The second thing Dean sees is Sam's shoes, which he doesn't leave at the door because Dean trips over them and scuffs them up when he does. Sam doesn't make enough money to buy new shoes when they get scuffed, or even shoe polish when they need it, so he puts them in the closet out of the way of harm.

The third thing Dean sees is a pair of beige heels resting in the sun next to Sam's shoes. He is absolutely, one-hundred percent certain that there is not a female living in the house with them at that moment in time, so the only real conclusion Dean can draw is that Sam, his little brother Sammy, has a girl over with him right now.

Boy, that was different.

Dean rounds the first corner in his house and stops at the first room that Sam may be in. He's lucky this time and enters the right room on the first try. Low and behold, his little Sammy is watching TV, still in his work clothes, and has his arm draped across the back of the couch – and subsequently around his squeeze's shoulder.

He thinks of a million and one things before he realizes he doesn't know what to think. So he _does_. He's always been about the action, and his actions toward his brother usually border on intentionally, obviously annoying.

_Somehow_, unexplainably, a large wad of paper whizzes past Sam's ear and smacks against the humming TV with a fragile squish. Sam's head jerks to the left and then spins around in one lovely, fluid motion that makes his too-long hair swish carelessly from the force. He sees nothing, but he knows its Dean's doing – he's the only other person with a key.

"Knock it off, jerk!" Sam calls, though he knows it's futile. Dean won't stop until the lower half of the house is demolished.

Dean hears the girl speak for the first time. Her voice is quiet, clear and bright– rather soothing actually, like a bell humming.

"That must be your brother, right?" she asks. Dean can't see her, but he knows she's smirking. He can hear the laughter in her voice.

In the same way that Dean can hear the smile in her voice, he can also hear the bitchface in Sam's voice. "Unfortunately."

"That's uncalled for!" Dean calls, and he darts behind the door of the next room. He's given away his position and must regroup. "What would you do without my pancakes every morning?"

"Lose weight!" Sam calls back, and that is the extent of response Dean gets from him.

Dean really doesn't know that Sam even needs help loosening up. It's been two years since Sam had a girlfriend, and in that space of time, he'd never so much as brought another girl to the house (Dean was sure that he hadn't even been out on a date). Any brotherly wingman-type antics that could have taken place, hadn't.

Instead of continuing the paper war and destroying the cleanliness of the downstairs area, Dean comes out of hiding. That in itself is far from normal, and Sam is put on red alert. Dean doesn't give up a paper war that easily. Paper wars always end with less-than-serious screaming matches and a lot of pouting until someone gets a trash bag and starts cleaning.

The big brother circles the couch and stands on the new girl's right-hand side. He extends a hand in greeting, which she takes.

"Hi, I'm Dean," he begins, squeezing her hand gently. She really is a pretty girl – neat and trimmed and tidy, brunette like Sam likes. "I'm the handsome brother."

Sam rolls his eyes, but the girl smiles knowingly. She squeezes his hand; her nails are bright bloody red. "I've heard about you, Mr. Winchester. You taught my little brother last year. I'm Madison."

Dean squints and draws his hand back. "Really? Who's your brother?"

"Jed Michaels," Madison replies. She's perfectly content to lean back into Sam and cross her arms. All that polished brunette hair is less than an inch from his nose. "You basically became his hero."

Dean scratches his head. He remembers. "Oh, yeah. He was a good kid. A little weird, but smart."

"If that's teacher language for _smug little shit_, you're spot-on," she laughs. That all-knowing look is still plain as day on her features, and it suits her. She nudges Sam. "Are you ready to go?"

Sam probably isn't even aware that he's been smiling like an idiot at her for five minutes. He jumps up behind her as she stands; he's lanky and gangly and about six inches taller than her even though he's barefoot.

"Oh, yeah, just let me get my jacket. You don't have to wait for me, you can head out to the car," Sam replies. As he's walking out behind her, he hooks his hand into the crook of Dean's elbow. He leans his head in. "I need to talk to you."

"I couldn't imagine why," Dean replies lowly, and as usual, he doesn't know when to get serious. "I know it's been a while, Sammy, but the it's the long dangly thing that goes in the-

Sam huffs loudly, "Shut up, asshole, I'm serious."

"Okay, serious," Dean says. He's still leaned in close because he's not sure that Madison has gone outside. "Look, if you need me to bail you out during the night, just use the code word."

"That's not what I'm concerned about," Sam says. He shifts nervously, feet shuffling. "I really like her, Dean."

Dean shrugs. "Then what's the problem, Sam?"

"I'm still thinking about Jess."

Dean takes Sam's shoulders in his hands, shaking him a little. He's stupidly tall, nearly three inches taller than Dean. When did his baby brother get so freaking tall?

"It's been two years, Sammy," he starts. It's The Speech again. Usually the speech is only given once or twice a year, and there's never another girl in the next room when he gives it. "Jess would want you to be happy, right?"

"Yeah, she would, but-

Dean shakes him again. "No 'buts.' Don't you get all mopey. You go take that girl out and give her a good time, and you have a good time, too. This is the first date you've been on in two years."

"I will, I'm just nervous."

"Don't be nervous," Dean says. He's all but shoving Sam out of the living room door and into the front hallways. "But let me give you the speech since dad isn't here."

Sam groans. "I don't need the speech. I'm an adult."

"Too bad," Dean snaps, but he's smiling like his face has been split open. "I want to the give the speech, but I don't have teenage kids. Plus, dad told me to give it to you when you finally decided to get back out there."

"Well, hurry up. She's waiting on me."

Dean draws in a huge breath, and he's giddy. He doesn't care how juvenile he looks bouncing like a puppy; he's really excited to give Sam the responsibility speech. Goodness knows he heard it from John enough – he's had it memorized since he was sixteen, but Sam's only heard it once.

"Okay – rules are: you pay on the first date. Whatever you do after the first date is between you and her, but you pay first time," Dean begins. He's talking fast, but he knows Sam's listening. "And if you're going back to her place, you know to wear a condom. Same goes for if you bring her back here – wear a rubber, clean up after yourself, and put a sock or something on the doorknob so that nobody walks in."

"Dude, that is the last thing I was even thinking of-

Dean holds up his hand, signaling for Sam to keep quiet. "Mouth shut, ears open."

Sam huffs and shuffles his feet again – he's uncomfortable, but Dean is amused.

The speech is continued. "Anyway, this is usually the part where dad gives me a curfew, but I can't do that because you're an elderly gentleman now. Just, I don't know, remember that you've got work in the morning. Don't be stupid."

Sam's expression is one of relief. "Are we done?"

Dean waves his upheld hand wantonly. "Be gone with ye, sinner."

As Sam leaves, Dean begins his slow trek up the stairs to his own room. He can hear Sam's deep voice all the way from the driveway, laughing at something Madison said. Dean hasn't heard his baby brother laugh like that in a long time.

The stairwell of the old house is small and cramped. The top and bottom stairs creak something awful, but Dean will probably never fix it. He refers to the groaning stairs as an alarm system that he doesn't have to pay for, and it works in tandem with the squeaking front door.

Sam's room is the first room on the left past the stairs. Dean rarely ever goes into Sam's room, but he knows Sam has at least two pictures of Jessica hanging around in there. He's doing a little reconnaissance; if the pair came back to the Winchester residence, Madison would probably be pretty uncomfortable if she saw another girl's picture stand on Sam's bedside table.

Dean turns the knob, and the door swings open silently. Sam's room is orderly and organized; it is the type of room where everything has its place and everything is in its place. Unlike Dean's room which is plastered with band posters, movie posters, and may or may not have a monstrous print of the cover of _Cat's Cradle_ above the bed, Sam's walls are filled with neatly framed pictures. The big center picture is a family picture, one of the Winchesters before Mary died.

Surrounding the formal family picture are smaller candids. There's one of Dean and Sam at the beach; they're both small children – Dean is a half-naked, skinny six-year-old smeared with sunscreen and Sam is a fat little sausage roll tucked into a floppy beach hat and a tiny white t-shirt and swimmies. There's one of Sam at prom with Jessica, just as tall and gangly as she was blonde and beautiful. Another shows Sam at his high-school graduation with his arm strung across Dean's broad shoulders.

True to form, the picture Dean is searching for is sitting pretty right where it has always sat. The only picture that doesn't hang on the wall is the picture of Jess that Sam keeps on his bedside table. It's a close-up shot of Jess laughing, her nose wrinkled and eyes squinted; Sam's face is in her neck, and he's so happy and full of love.

Dean removes it from the desktop and carefully stows it in the drawer of the bedside table. The picture leaves a square of wood touched by a thin layer of dust.

* * *

**A/N:** First chapter, ladies and gentlemen. Don't worry, I'm introducing Cas soon. :) A little side note: the Madison in this story is _not_ an OC. Madison is is the lawyer's secretary from episode 2.17, entitled _Heart_. Her last name was never mentioned, so I took a little creative freedom and gave her the last name of Michaels. Remember, beloved readers, that this is an AU. Also, like all of my stories, it starts of as rated T, but _will_ become rated-M. Before I up the rating, I will give a warning the chapter before, and a warning at the beginning of the chapter instead of my usual quote.

In typical Supernatural fashion, the names of the chapters will be the names of classic rock songs. Today's song: _Working Man_ by Rush.


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